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Talk:Essay:Best New Conservative Words (view source)
Revision as of 04:51, January 11, 2014
, 04:51, January 11, 2014Uncertainty principle
:Criteria should be is it in use. A quick Google search shows that it is. Second, is it listed in Merriam's. No it is not. --[[User:Jpatt|Jpatt]] 04:32, 6 October 2013 (EDT)
:Criteria should be is it in use. A quick Google search shows that it is. Second, is it listed in Merriam's. No it is not. --[[User:Jpatt|Jpatt]] 04:32, 6 October 2013 (EDT)
==Uncertainty principle==
The notion that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle says something about general "chaos", or the "running down" of the universe, or the lifetime of humans being nearly always under 120 years, or the impossibility of perpetual motion machines is a naive misperception that has gone on for too long.
Under the Copenhagen interpretation, the uncertainty is not revealed until the wave function collapses, which, in layman's terms, means until we open Schrödinger's box and look at the cat. Until then, the wave function is exact and eternal. It does not "run down". For example, the wave function of a Hydrogen atom in the ground state is
:<math>\Psi = e^{\frac{me^2}{4\pi\varepsilon\hbar^2}}</math>
Forever. The Hydrogen atom ''really is a perpetual motion machine''. (Except for issues involving GUT's, which are outside of Quantum mechanics ''per se''.)
Furthermore, there are animals that commonly live to be much older than 120 years, and trees that live into the thousands. The matter in living things is controlled by the same quantum mechanics, no matter what the species. Finite lifetimes arise from biological issues that have nothing to do with the uncertainty principle.
[[User:SamHB|SamHB]] 23:51, 10 January 2014 (EST)